Visualizing Unicode

Unicode is one the great achievements of our era. It’s also incredibly intimidating.

So I love to come across videos and web sites that help demystify Unicode.

A week ago I came across a video created by jörg piringer that displays, in fast motion, nearly 50,000 Unicode characters. I’ve embedded it below:

The video lasts 33 minutes, and it still only displays about half of all Unicode characters. But even so, the video is a great tool to help people who have never heard of Unicode get a feel for how massive this encoding truly is.

But let’s say you want to see the ENTIRE Unicode set.

Fortunately, Andrew West has created a nifty web page that allows you to view all Unicode characters (fonts permitting) — and at your own leisurely pace. I highly recommend checking it out.